The planned extension of last session’s “Guitar Hero” transition project from Musselburgh Grammar and its feeder primaries to the whole of East Lothian gets a mention in today’s Edinburgh Evening News:
It was so successful it is now being rolled out across almost all primary and secondary schools in the county.
Pupils used the themes in the game as the basis for art, music, PE and English projects. They then shared their work with children who had come from other primary schools.
They introduced the project to help ease the transition for primary seven pupils moving up to Musselburgh Grammar School. (Link)
You’ll find more on the use of Guitar Hero to provide a context for learning on the Learning & Teaching Scotland ICT in Education site.
We’ve said before that edubuzz.org visits were hitting over 10,000 per day during May, but how busy is it in terms of contributions?
To keep an eye on that we’ve added the Blog Activity plugin from WPMU DEV Premium. It hasn’t been running for a full month yet, but a random check today showed that in the last week there were over 1000 contributions: 504 posts and 499 comments.
This balance between posts and comments is a good indication - if any were needed - of the changing times for education web sites.
Thanks to Lynne Lewis, Athelstaneford Primary students now have their own copy of the Glow Games.
If you’d like to add them to your eduBuzz site, you’ll find instructions below.
All East Lothian staff with either school or council email addresses can now use “Create new blog“.
After a spate of spam blogs, this option was temporarily restricted. Before long, usage took off and we had to keep the restriction in place to avoid server overload. Capacity has now been increased, and restrictions partially lifted. If you’re East Lothian staff, you can now create as many edubuzz blogs as you want. What are you waiting for?
French video sharing site Dailymotion.com offers a wide range of entertaining French-language videos which can help make language learning fun. And if you’ve an edubuzz blog, you can easily embed them in your posts. Here’s how to do it:
- Click “Menu” in the bottom right of the video, then choose “URL and embed code”
- Under the Embed box, click “Copy code”.
- In your WordPress blog’s editor, click the yellow A (for Anarchy) toolbar button.
- Paste the Embed code into the box that pops up. (You’ll notice the box says “For DAILYMOTION and BREAK videos and iTUNES IMIXES just copy and paste the code from their embeddable players.)
Thanks are due to Jackie Swan for the idea. And here’s the end result, using one of Dailymotion’s most popular recent videos:
The eduBuzz Support Wiki at http://edubuzz.org/support now features five short video tutorials on WordPress.
Each video is around 5 minutes long, and is ideal for new users or for people needing a quick intro to the redesigned back-end menu system. Topics covered are:
The videos, presented by James Farmer, are from WPMU DEV Premium.
Edubuzz.org has been updated over the holidays, so if you’ve an edubuzz blog you’ll notice changes to the admin screens. If you just need a quick tour of the basics, get your speakers on and watch the 5-minute video (11MB, opens in full-screen), or use the player below.
The good news is these changes make WordPress easier to use. The more advanced options, for example, have been moved below the Write Post screen to make the interface less intimidating for new users. This will make it easier for more students and staff to get started with web publishing.
Some new features have been added in response to feedback from WordPress users world-wide. These include:
- the ability to set the size of image thumbnails, and to use mid-sized thumbnails
- the replacement of the separate Upload area, which confused some people, with “Add Media”
- a full-screen editing option
- easier, more obvious, options for making posts appear on future dates
Jeffrey Zeldman provides a good 10-point summary of the key changes.
Of course, if you need a bit more assistance, please get in touch by leaving a comment or by email.
Today we’ve entered Edubuzz.org for the BECTA ICT Excellence Awards Support for Schools category.
This category aims to reward those organisations who support school improvement with ICT, encouraging the systematic and innovative use of appropriate technologies to deliver learning and teaching, communicate with the wider school community and improve administrative efficiency.
Luckily it’s accepted that not every project will hit all the targets, so our inability to make any claims for improving admin efficiency shouldn’t be too much of a disadvantage. Last year’s winners were announced in November, so we may have a while to wait before we know how things have gone…
Yesterday blog number 1000 was created for a P7 student at the small rural Innerwick Primary School.
It was part of a set of 7 for the P7 members of Lindy Lynn’s composite P4/5/6/7 class, reflecting the increasing use of blogs to provide web publishing tools to individual students. The blogs will be used by the P7s for a project to reflect on their time at Innerwick, and the group are full of ideas!
Staff are also talking about the possibility offered to get some collaborative work going with other feeder primaries in the Dunbar Grammar School cluster, with the aim of helping the children to get to know some other students who’ll be joining them at the much larger secondary after the summer.
In another sign of the times, due to staff pressures, the P7 group were trained in a 3-hour session yesterday morning, without their class teacher, in how to use the blogs, and - not surprisingly - picked it up very quickly. They’ll now be training their teacher, and supporting one another, to get started in the classroom.
Total visits to edubuzz.org for March 08 - including everything from authors posting to search engines crawling - were up over 100% on Mar 07. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to that!
